Cool article in the NY Times Region section today about how librarians are information providers to parents and children on everyday issues. Makes me proud to be in the profession, sniff.
My new job (which I'm sure I'll talk about in broad details here as I settle in) has me working in the children's room at least part of the time. It's a little weird for me because I didn't experience children's services as a child, and I never thought working with kids would be where my career would ever remotely land me. Matter of fact, I never set foot in a library until I was 6 years old. My mom thought we had to pay--I had a crumpled fiver that had gone through the wash to pay for my card and was shocked to find the library was free, and all I had to do was write my name and address on the card application. And happy, because $5 is a lot of money.
I mention this not to make my family look like uneducated boobs (because we're not), but because I find there's not a lot of talk among the profession about diversity of background in terms of information access and use. It's assumed that we all got the message early on that Library=Good Public Institution To Use In These Ways and we're all so in love with the public service mission that we'll work for less money and feel the love. Oh and the idea that The Library Is A Must Have For The Community. We really don't understand the whys and hows of nonuser populations and are shocked when levies don't pass or libraries close. And in a lot of ways we are a middle class profession. It's not a question of how do we market the library to the population, but understanding the hows and whys of nonusers to see what they think about the library.
